By LEVI PULKKINEN, SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

Updated 10:00 pm, Thursday, October 29, 2009

The proposition came over ice cream, the young woman told the King County jury.

She said her boyfriend of three weeks, admitted West Seattle gang member Mycah Johnson, offered it gently -- would she make money for him selling her body?

"He said he'd buy me a sundae if I would answer a question for him," the 19-year-old told jurors. "He said, and these are his words, 'Would you make money doing what you like to do anyway?'

"Just give it a try and see if you like it."

Testifying Thursday against accused pimp and alleged West Side Street Mobb member Deshawn Cash Money Clark, the young woman explained her months-long relationship with Johnson in an attempt by prosecutors to show jurors the mix of young love and cruelty that lands girls on Seattle streets selling sex.

Charged alongside four other members of the West Seattle-based gang, Clark, 19, is currently on trial in King County Superior Court on accusations that he profited from a human trafficking and child prostitution scheme involving at least three women. Johnson, the young woman's former pimp, previously pleaded guilty to related charges, as have the all those similarly charged except Clark.

Addressing the jury, the young woman described in detail how Johnson approached her at a downtown Seattle bus stop and, she said, set her on a path to make her boyfriend hundreds of dollars a night prostituting herself. Her account mirrored the tales of manipulation and greed offered by Johnson and the other young men after each pleaded guilty.

By her telling, Johnson, now 19, was a flirt when he asked for her number during a chance run in at a Third Avenue bus stop across from the downtown Seattle Macy's. He asked for her number and got it; he called and she answered.

She told him about her ex, who, she said, left her after she said she wouldn't hook for him. She said she didn't do that kind of thing, at least not until Johnson asked.

"He played on everything that I went through," the young woman said, responding to questions from Deputy Prosecutor Christina Miyamasu. "He made me promises that were backed up by promises. I should have known better, because I guess promises are made to be broken. …

"If I'd said no, he would have left me."

Hours after Johnson popped the question, the young woman -- then 18 -- said she was out at "the fashion show," her term for a stretch of sidewalk off of Denny Way near Seattle Center.

Accompanying her and Johnson, she told jurors, was Clark and a teen prostitute who has also testified in the case. Johnson gave her instructions -- don't talk to men or "ho-cialize" with other prostitutes, get in as many cars as you can.

Her first "john" was a middle-age man with a thick black mustache and lots of stubble, she told the jury. She said she climbed into his van, had sex with him and was paid $85 for her trouble.

"I was panicked to see the guy sitting there," she said. "I know what he wanted and I was still scared. I remembered the TV shows where a girl gets into a car … and you could just die."

The money, like the thousands of dollars that would come later, went straight to Johnson.

The young woman said she began dodging her mother's phone calls as she continued to work the streets with prostitutes being pimped by Clark. Johnson, or his associates, set her up with Web advertisements and hotel rooms, and she continued to "walk the track" in Seattle and Tukwila.

Johnson, she said, had a "man crush" on Clark. Johnson would dress like his childhood friend, at least once donning a nearly identical outfit to Clark's that went well beyond the red clothing required to signify membership in the West Side Street Mobb.

While working for Johnson, the young woman told jurors, she often saw Clark's girls bruised from beatings she believed Clark had delivered. She said she never saw the blows fall, though she once heard what could only be an altercation in Clark's hotel room while staying with Johnson in a room down the hall.

Cross examined by Clark's defense attorney, Alfoster Garrett, Jr., the woman declined to say whether she'd engaged in other activities West Side Street Mobb members allegedly use to make money, specifically bank fraud and drug dealing.

She did, in answering Garrett's questions, say she'd seen at least one woman Clark is accused of prostituting hand him money immediately after turning a trick.

Asked by Garrett whether Johnson ever beat her, the young woman said he had not. He berated her when she didn't make enough money, she said, but sometimes apologized and thanked her for doing her best.

"So he had a heart, gangster with a heart?" Garrett asked.

"I guess you could say that," the young woman said.

But Johnson's statement to the court upon entering a guilty plea throws that assertion into contention.

As did the other accused pimps, Johnson issued a mea culpa along with a guilty plea. In his, Johnson described manipulating the young woman into prostitution weeks after they met.

"I told (her) she and I could have a life together but that she needed to 'work' to make us money," Johnson told the court. "(She) loved me and she agreed to be a prostitute."

Clark and the others in the gang, Johnson said, were up to the same thing, though Clark "used force and threats as a means to coerce the girls and keep them obedient and under his control."

Some of those girls and young women, prosecutors contend, were marked with tattoos carrying Clark's middle name -- Cash -- or dollar signs.

Taking Garrett's questions Thursday, the young woman acknowledged that, at the time, she worked for Johnson out what she thought to be love.

"To me," she said, "that connection between a pimp and a prostitute was like, you do anything for the person you love."

She said she plans to return to the Philippines and start again in the country she left as a young child.